Surprisingly Productive

On Black Friday family members wanted to join the mobs at the mall. The mall was the last place I wanted to be--we INTJs don't like shopping in crowds--but when one has a family one must sacrifice one's own preferences for the greater good. It took only 15 minutes of driving around to find a parking space.

I ordered a coffee at Barnes & Noble and planted myself at a table with the MacBook. (Free Wi-Fi is a blessing to INTJs.) During the next hour I cleared over a hundred shopping messages from various e-mail inboxes. Black Friday at the mall turned out to be surprisingly productive. Tip for the day: always keep your expectations low, then you'll feel better when things don't turn out as bad as you thought.

Great Moments in Food Science

While you and I may consider a coffee splurge to be a $3 latte at Starbucks, the upper 1% are paying eighty simoleons for coffee brewed from civet droppings.

At those heady prices Kopi Luwak is ripe for counterfeiting and adulterating (though for yours truly watering down would be a feature, not a bug).  But now a Japanese scientist may have come up with a way of detecting whether the dark brown juice in the cup is the genuine article.

Dr. Fukusaki’s quest began with many piles of civet faeces [blogger's note: British spelling makes it sound classier] , as well as undigested coffee beans from plantations in Bali, Java and Sumatra, all of which he treated by roasting them at 205°C and then grinding them up. Instead of popping them into a percolator at this point, though, he mixed them with distilled water, methanol and chloroform to extract the sorts of chemicals that give coffee its flavour. He then ran the extracts through a gas chromatograph and a mass spectrometer, to see what was in them.

The crucial giveaways of Kopi Luwak turned out to be four substances: citric acid, malic acid, pyroglutamic acid and inositol.

As the article points out, coffee drinkers can just add the chemicals themselves and get a much cheaper drink similar to Kopi Luwak. We'll wait and see; for us it will also need to pass the smell test. © 2013 Stephen Yuen

Sleepless in San Francisco

Fitful sleep has been our constant companion for the past 40 years due to the usual culprits: work-related stress, lack of physical activity, and a two-cup-a-day coffee habit. After early retirement and a welcome change in career, I'm making progress on the stress and exercise but have been unwilling to cut the caffeine...until this week when I switched to decaf.

Quitting cold turkey was tough for a couple of days; the morning headaches made it difficult to concentrate, and by the late afternoon the craving for a nap became nearly overwhelming. However, I'm now sleeping through the night, and problem-solving during the workday seems a little sharper (measured from a low starting point, to be sure).

According to the American Psychiatric Association,

To be diagnosed with caffeine withdrawal, a patient must experience at least three of five symptoms within 24 hours of stopping or reducing caffeine intake: headache, fatigue or drowsiness, depressed mood or irritability, difficulty concentrating, and flulike symptoms such as nausea or muscle pain.

With three withdrawal symptoms checked, your humble observer sure looks like he was/is "addicted" to caffeine, but he's content to leave that final judgment to the professionals.

The Time of Plenty

Most of our family lives in Hawaii.

Thanks to Christmas, we won't have to buy coffee for a while.

Thanks to dozens of charity mailers, I won't have to buy personalized return-address labels, ever.

Thanks to our tankless water heater, we don't have to worry about running out of hot water.

Thanks to our high-capacity DVR that adds hours of TV programs each day, we can always pull up something we want to watch.

Our (and most people's, despite the PR) taxes have gone up, but this truly is the time of plenty. And, yes, we're easy to please.  © 2013 Stephen Yuen